MDegert,
I don't typically comment on threads like these, but felt truly compelled by your disparaging comments regarding Mr. Garrison's comments. All of us in our lab concurred that one long-winded replay that was created by all of us was much better than many, many non-cohesive posts.
I don't work for any processor company, but I certainly must agree that this device is nowhere near ready for "prime time" professional use, especially where the well being of anyone or anything is concerned. Unlike Mr. Garrison, I will continue to work with it to learn it, and try to help the community sort out the myriad issues that are present in Galileo right now, and hope that these will be alleviated in time. I look forward to the day when it IS ready, but it is still quite a way from being there. Very unlike the Arduino family that we do a very large amount of development AND deployment on, devices that may indeed affect the well-being of people, animals and aquatic life need to be stable and bug-free than the current Intel platform The Arduino platform has been exceptionally reliable and is quick and inexpensive to develop on. But we, like many, have been handicapped by horsepower deficiencies that we hope the Galileo will help us overcome. In the mean time, we'll stick to our current environment.
Not one of us here construed Mr. Garrison's comments as "this is junk" kind of statements; instead we thought, and we certainly agree, that more work needs to done, bugs need fixed, tool chains improved et al. before we will look at this potentially excellent new device the way we look at Arduino or Pi. It is simply that people have different design requirements or project goals or SLA requirements to use these devices. In fact, we don't know WHAT the intentions of his comments were, so let's not begin a flaming thread on what someone said, instead, lets look at the issues that need to be resolved to make this a "prime time" platform. I for one would like to know what issues are keeping it from being "prime time" so that they can be resolved. None or us here took that as discouragement from Mr. Garrison; we took that as a "not ready for productopn" comment. And he is correct.
Alex in particular has been very helpful to those of starting to develop for this platform, but the rest of the Intel support structure is seriously lacking, again a "prime time" requirement for many people. For many of this who have been working with embedded project for many years, we (justly) worry that this could be the next "little product from a big compnay" that never gets proper support from the manufacturer and from the community, and when you are required to learn many different platforms over the course of a year, you tend to try and choose how to spend your research time wisely, especially given to higher cost for Galileo compared to many other solutions. Few people will be convered over 15-20 or even 40 dollars US, but 100 is starting down a different path whether you are a commercial interest or a personal project developer. And so there is nothing wrong with taking the wait and see attitude that Mr. Garrison spoke of. It is simply saying "wait if you're not willing to tinker or you need high stability" in your project ..... yet. It may come, but it may not.
I have big plans for using Galileo in many of our projects, but for now I'll still with the Due and other Arduinos and the Pi; their support track record is well established and I can focus on development issues of MY projects, not of the manufacturer's. I'll keep playing with each new release, but it's not yet ready for any of us to anything that we would consider serious on. These issues are all well documented in these and other forums, and it appears that Alex take each one seriously. But they still remain, and thus far only Alex has provided any of us here with responses to our technical inquires. Hopefully that will change.
Thanks for reading this, from all of us.